Merchants are continuously looking for ways to speed up the checkout process in retail establishments. A simple saving of a few seconds for each transaction can result in major savings when the seconds are applied to the hundreds or thousands of checkout lanes that may exist across all the retail stores of an enterprise.
The problem that exists today is that the checkout process is very heavily loaded on the back-end, specifically, the payment side of the sales transaction. Over the years, improvements have been made in the front-end of the sales process with the innovation of scanners, etc., but there is still much room for improvement in the payment area of the sales process.
In retailing technology, there are now many technology innovations that can enhance the customer checkout process. These include touch screen displays, Java-based graphical terminal sales applications, etc. Java-based graphical terminal sales applications include a Java-based customer graphical user interface (GUI) that is basically a read-only device used to display details of a sales transaction to the customer as it is occurring in real time, as well as optionally displaying advertising data to the customer. In addition, there is currently an increasing trend in the use of customer loyalty cards. There is also a further technology trend to combine the multiple loyalty cards with a credit card, onto a smart card. Versions of the “combination-loyalty cards” are already in use in several areas of the country.
There is a need for a system to enhance the payment processing in retail stores. Such a system will reduce the amount of time it takes to process a retail sales transaction. Such a solution can be taking the existing state-of-the-art technologies, (e.g., touch screen, smart cards, Java-based applications, etc.) and combining them into an application and system that reduces the amount of time it takes to complete each retail transaction.